Accelerate Data Center Sales with Cisco and Veeam

Veeam® enables Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™ and complements Cisco by providing the data management solutions required for 24/7 application availability. In this informational webinar learn how Cisco and Veeam are addressing the disruption of the digital economy, the opportunity associated, and the support resources available to partners to accelerate pipeline growth and closed deals.

Our session this year is focusing on the automation and orchestration around Veeam and VMware. But what does that mean? The point of our session to highlight the flexibility of the Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform, some people just want the simple, easy to use wizard driven approach to install their Veeam components within their environments but some will want that little bit more and this is where APIs come in and allow us to drive a more streamlined and automated approach to delivering Veeam components.We also highlighted this by running through everything live, I will get to the nuts and bolts of that shortly.With there being a strong focus this year’s event, we wanted to highlight the capabilities by using VMware on AWS. Veeam were one of the first vendors highlighted as a supported data protection platform that could protect workloads within VMware on AWS that was 1 year ago and we wanted to highlight those features and capabilities within Veeam.

Veeam Availability Orchestrator – “Replication on Steroids”

The first thing we will touch on is Veeam Availability Orchestrator released this year, this provides a “Replication on Steroids” option for your vSphere environment, this environment can be on premises or leveraging any other vSphere environment, maybe say VMware on AWS where maybe you would still like to keep your DR location on premises and send those replicas down in case of any service disruption within the AWS cloud. The replication concentrates on the application over just sending a VM from site to site, what this also enables is the ability to run automated testing against these replicas to simulate disaster recovery scenarios. Oh and the other large part of this is the automated documentation. Ever had to create your own DR Run Book? I have this does the majority for you whilst being dynamic to any changes in configuration.

Veeam DataLabs

The we wanted to highlight some more automation goodness around Veeam DataLabs, what this gives alongside that Backup and Replication capability is the ability to have an automated way of testing that your backups, replicas or storage snapshots are in a good recoverable state. It also provides the ability to get more leverage from those sources to provide isolated environments for other ways of gaining insight or improving better business outcomes.I plan to follow up on this as this is one of my passions within our technology stack the ability to leverage Veeam DataLabs from many of the products in the platform to drive different outcomes is really where I see us differentiating in the market.

The Bulk of the session

As you can see we are already cramming quite a bit into the session. But this is the main focus point of the day for us, it’s about delivering a fully configured Veeam environment from the ground up, all live whilst we are on stage. Oh and because we can we are doing this on VMware on AWS.The driving use case for this was around the Veeam proof of concept process, I mean it was fast, deploy one windows server and 7 clicks later you have Veeam configured, perfect. But the issue wasn’t the Veeam installation, what if we could take an automated approach and be able to understand the customer pain points and needs and then in the background automate out the process of building the Veeam components and automatically start protecting a sub set of data all in the first hour of that meeting?The beauty of this is, is you do not need to be a DevOps engineer skilled in configuration management or a developer in Ruby. The hard work has been done already and is available for free on GitHub and in the CHEF Supermarket.I have listed the tools below that we used to get things up and running and to be honest if you were to pull this down when we make this available you will only really need PowerShell, PowerCLI and Terraform installed on your workstation.The steps we went through live was deploying that Veeam Backup & Replication server along with multiple proxy servers to deal with the load appropriately. Because of the location of the Veeam components and our production environment we chose to also leverage the native AWS services and we deployed an EC2 instance for our backup repository but this could be any storage in any location as per our repository best practices, we also added a Veeam cloud connect service provider to show a different media type and location for your backup or replication requirements. Finally we automated the provisioning of vSphere tags and then created backup jobs based on those.By the end of the session we had the following built out, over on the right you can see we have a Veeam Backup & Replication server and some additional proxies. On the left at the top we have our Veeam cloud connect backup as a service offering and at the bottom left we also have our on-premises vSphere environment where we could send further backup files or even as a target for those replication jobs. Underneath the VMware on AWS you can see the Amazon EC2 instance where we will store our initial backup files for fast recovery.As I know some of you will be catching this whilst at the show I want to give a shameless plug out for the next session which goes into more detail around the Chef element of this dynamic deployment so you can find those details below.I also want to give a huge shoutout to @VirtPirate aka Jeremy Goodrum of Exosphere who helped make the terraform and chef peice happen he also has an article over here diving into the latest version of the cookbook and some other code releases he has made that are related.Veeam Cookbook 2.1.1 released and Sample vSphere Terraform TemplatesExpect to see much more content about this in the form of a whitepaper and more blogs to consume.The post Intelligent Data Management for a Hybrid World appeared first on vZilla.

Exclusive: Veeam’s best practices for availability in a cloud era – ChannelLife NZ

veeam – Google News

Article by Veeam product strategy VP Danny AllanThe new digital economy has brought about many changes, forcing businesses and their IT infrastructure to react in new ways to meet new demands.When it comes to the cloud, the changes are just as dynamic.Research has found that 81% of enterprises are embracing a multi-cloud strategy with a mix of solutions across private, public, and hybrid clouds – across multiple providers.With this big move to multi-cloud, the next question is How can businesses ensure their apps and data are available across the new multi-cloud models they are adopting?Before that question is addressed, here are some stats highlighting the downside of low availability:

66 % of enterprises admit that digital transformation initiatives are being held back by unplanned downtime

$21.8M is an average financial cost of availability and protection gaps for the enterprise

60% of U.S. businesses that experience a cyber-attack suffer the consequence of data loss

Fortunately, there are some measures businesses can take to ensure optimal availability.

Here are three key multi-cloud availability best practices to consider:

1. Leverage the cloud for backup and disaster recovery of on-premises data

A good start for any availability strategy is to make sure to follow the 3-2-1 Rule, which is to have at least three copies of data, two of which are local but on different mediums, and at least one off-site copy. Businesses with a multi-cloud strategy are in an ideal position to take advantage of the cloud to help execute a 3-2-1 approach and optimise any legacy backup systems with the cloud.

2. Protect data that’s already in the cloud

It’s important to have control and protection over data already deployed in the cloud. Email data, for instance, is something many organisations must retain for extended periods of time for compliance and regulatory needs. Whether an organisation is using a SaaS solution, such as Microsoft Office 365, or hosting their email application on IaaS, it is critical to have protection against accidental deletions, outages, or a malicious attack.

3. Replicate and migrate applications and data within the cloud

In a multi-cloud strategy, a company will most likely have “born in the cloud” applications in their environment. Being able to replicate these applications for data protection and recovery will be critical to making sure these apps stay up and running in the event of unexpected downtime.For instance, a company may currently run their cloud-based app in the IBM Cloud data centre located in Houston, Texas.It can replicate and migrate this app to any of the more than 50 IBM Cloud data centres around the world, or to any data centre within its cloud to meet its data protection and migration needs.With the momentum to multi-cloud adoption in full swing, having an availability strategy and plan is more important than ever.

Join NetApp and Veeam on Monday, September 17th, to connect with our technology experts and see first-hand our commitment to your success. Meet our local enablement teams, discover new sales opportunities with our joint solutions, and learn from the experts who will pull it all together for you.

Agenda Overview 4:00pm – 7:00pm

Welcome & Introductions

Veeam’s Hyper-Availability Solutions

NetApp Product Updates

Wrap-Up, Networking & Raffle Drawing

Beer & Pizza

Register today to reserve your seating.

We hope to see you there! Cheers, Veeam & NetApp

Share this event on Facebook and Twitter.We hope you can make it!Cheers,NetApp & Veeam

Six reasons to backup Office 365.Do you have control of your Office 365 data? Do you have access to all the items you need? The knee-jerk reaction is typically: “Of course I do,” or “Microsoft takes care of it all.” But if you really think about it, are you sure?This report explores the hazards of not having an Office 365 backup in your arsenal, and why backup solutions for Microsoft Office 365 fill the gap of long-term retention and data protection.

Cisco and Veeam have created what they are calling a “game-changer” in the hyper-converged infrastructure market by infusing Veeam’s data management platform into Cisco’s flagship HyperFlex platform.

“It’s going to be a game-changer for the industry,” said Peter McKay, co-CEO and president of Veeam, in an interview with CRN at VMworld 2018. “We’re the first and the only intelligent data management solution for Cisco HyperFlex. It’s a tightly integrated the solution [and we’re] going to market together as a joint, one single SKU, that all the Cisco sales organizations, Cisco channel, Veeam channel can take advantage of.”

Veeam will integrate its new, highly resilient data management platform, Veeam High Availability, into Cisco HyperFlex. The vendor’s High Availability solution provides seamless scalability, ease of management and support for multi-cloud environments through Cisco support services, supporting all virtual, physical and cloud workloads.

McKay said Veeam will soon be rolling out channel enablement on the new solution as well as new partner incentive programs to drive sales.

“We’re going to introduce some interesting and exciting new programs to incentivize the channel to really grab it and run with this new offering,” he said.

The new Veeam Availability on Cisco HyperFlex will be offered through Cisco and is backed by Cisco Solution Support, which provides support for the entire solution stack, enabling customers to deploy with confidence and peace of mind. Veeam Availability on Cisco HyperFlex is expected to be generally available in the fourth quarter of 2018.

“The focus for us was really around, ‘How do we make it easier for them to buy. Easier for them to deploy. Easier for them to manage a combined solution. That’s what we really focused on, easier for the customers to manage and run a data management solution,” said McKay. “We think this is a win for our customers. A win for our partners and a win for Cisco and Veeam.”

That’s a wrap for day 2 of VMworld, there were two big bits worth mentioning from a Veeam perspective, firstly it is the VMware on AWS marketplace and the addition of Veeam Backup & Replication as an option for automated deployment.

This screen has been taken from beta testing.

To summarise what this means is, for the Veeam customers that have taken the steps to leverage VMware on AWS by giving those customers the same simple, easy to use and seamlessly easy to get thing protected from a backup and replication point of view, using the same toolset that we know from our on-premises vSphere environment.

Yesterday I spoke about automation and we also shared this information in our session about this feature also coming available, both this and the chef and terraform we spoke about yesterday are both types of automation but for possibly different end users and prospects.

The beauty of what we discussed of the CHEF deployment is it allows for us to be more distributed and dynamic, this offering is going to get things up and running as fast as possible and start protecting workloads. There will also be some customers that don’t want to explore the open source community of our CHEF cookbook.

It’s as simple as deploying to your SDDC and then choosing the CloudFormation template. The template will use the VPC that is linked to your VMware on AWS instance. The CloudFormation template will be executed on the VMware on AWS instance.

This template from CloudFormation will then run through the creation of the stack required.

When that CloudFormation template has been ran it’s then time to start the environment configuration, resource pools, network configuration etc.

Then is the summary screen to show you all the configuration you are about to commit.

This will then continue the deployment with your configuration and you will be able to see the Veeam server deployed within your SDDC.

When you first login to the newly created Veeam server you will see that the repository server has been added down to the stack configuration of the CloudFormation template. It has also added your vSphere vCenter server. You can now see the VMs within your SDDC and can begin protecting those instances.

The final thing I wanted to share was the capabilities, it’s not just backup, you also have the ability to replicate these virtual machines from this vSphere environment to any other environment including an on-premises environment, a Cloud Connect Service Provider offering replication as a service or to another vSphere environment anywhere.

What is the single most important question you can ask your customer? For us, it is how likely they would be to recommend Veeam to a friend or colleague.

Our mission at Veeam is to be the most trusted provider of intelligent data management solutions to meet the expectations of a world that demands the Hyper-Availability of data. Our customers are at the core of our business, and constant feedback is the best way to improve over time.

To help us build trust with our customers, every year we send out a survey that helps us understand how they perceive our products and services. The Customer Satisfaction Survey was conducted by an independent third party, and then used for the Net Promoter Score (NPS) — the index measuring customers’ willingness to recommend a company’s products or services to others.

Veeam’s 2018 Net Promoter Score, 3.5 times the industry average

The respondents were asked how likely they would be to recommend Veeam to a friend or colleague, considering their complete experience with our company. Their answer is a number that is calculated into a score between -100 and +100.

Veeam scored an NPS of 73, which is 3.5 times higher than the industry average (21). This result shows a remarkable appreciation from our customers and places Veeam in the company of some of today’s biggest and most beloved brands: Amazon (61), Netflix (68) and trending toward Apple (89). At a regional level, EMEA’s NPS moved up to 76, being the strongest region in terms of customer satisfaction!

Scoring a high satisfaction level is not a popularity contest, it’s an exam we need to pass, and one where we raise the bar every year. The result of the customer satisfaction survey not only confirms that we put the right efforts and energy in everything we do, but also guides us to areas where we can do better to outperform our competition.

With over 300,000 customers across the globe, it’s essential to understand how satisfied they are about our offerings.

This is a massive achievement for Veeam, and it comes in a key moment — we are on the path to exceed a billion dollars in bookings in 2018. Becoming the next billion-dollar software company is not something you hear every day, and this wouldn’t be possible without our valuable partnerships. Our strong bonds with our alliance partners, Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE, Microsoft, NetApp and VMware, enable Veeam to provide data center transformation, infrastructure modernization and cloud solutions and services to clients worldwide.

For the fifth consecutive year, Veeam has outperformed the industry, scoring 9.0+ for almost all categories, and trust me, this is not getting easier. Technology is developing at a faster pace than ever and so are the expectations of people for their digital lives.

Cisco chooses Veeam as its first and only Intelligent Data Management partner

Veeam Executive Blog – The Availability Lounge / Peter McKay

“What got you here, won’t get you there” is a saying that’s especially true when it comes to the IT industry. Vendors today need to continually innovate their offerings to keep pace with customer demand. This is more important than ever in the data management industry, and when it comes to innovation, Veeam has always been at the forefront. Today, we are taking this idea one step further.

Cisco has chosen Veeam to deliver a new approach for the Modern Data Center, Veeam Availability Solution on Cisco HyperFlex. This announcement means customers can now run Veeam’s Intelligent Data Management platform on a completely hyperconverged solution, simplifying their deployments and reducing the resources needed to manage them. Cisco HyperFlex provides a platform that delivers seamless scalability, ease of management and multi-cloud support.

Available through Cisco and providing support for the entire solution stack, customers can deploy with confidence and peace of mind. I’m excited Cisco and Veeam both share the goal of helping our customers gain control of their data across all clouds, and that customers can now leverage their existing Cisco procurement relationships. This announcement also makes Veeam the first and only Intelligent Data Management solution to partner with Cisco on HyperFlex as a secondary storage target.

The scale and complexity of managing the hyper-growth and hyper-sprawl of enterprise data today, especially across multi-cloud environments, requires a new type of solution. It requires a solution that moves from traditional, policy-based data management to a more behavior-based system, so data can manage itself more autonomously and deliver critical business and operational insights at record speeds. Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform is the most complete solution to help customers make the transition to Intelligent Data Management, and today’s announcement with Cisco will enable organizations to fully embrace this future.

Our relationship with Cisco has been long and fruitful. Veeam has partnered with Cisco to provide backup for HyperFlex workloads, including snapshot integration for lower RPOs. What sets this announcement apart is that Cisco has been enhanced with Large Form Factor drives, allowing the platform to both run Veeam services, as well as to act as the repository for Veeam backup jobs.

Unreliable technology is causing nearly two-thirds of organizations today to admit they are being held back by unplanned downtime. That’s why our partnership with Cisco continues to thrive. Our joint announcement for Veeam Availability on Cisco HyperFlex is a response to the direct feedback from enterprise customers, partners and service providers.

Organizations have long built their IT architecture on Cisco hardware. Veeam recognizes that investing in a partnership that leverages this underlying platform allows for a level of trust and confidence as Veeam and Cisco work together delivering a superior outcome over legacy vendor solutions that can’t respond to rapidly changing IT environments.

As Veeam is dominating the data management marketplace, we recognize the responsibility of working with our infrastructure partners to provide a simple solution that cuts through the complexity of past industry offerings.

The timing of this announcement is not coincidental. Currently, many legacy companies are feeling the strain of exponential data growth. With data sprawl pushing the need for protection out to the edge of the IT environment, legacy solutions from legacy vendors are struggling to adjust.

Veeam’s explosive growth is due to our focus on the Modern Data Center and its unique needs. Veeam Availability on Cisco HyperFlex is designed to deliver seamless enterprise scalability. This is increasingly important as complexity continues to challenge IT departments. This joint solution reduces overall complexity and effort required to run a data-protection solution. It also provides a single stack, which is pre-validated, assuring customers that Cisco stands behind the solution.

I recognize that every time a customer makes a buying decision with Veeam they are making a choice that goes far beyond the technical. They are making a decision that puts their company and their own careers on the line. I know this, and every person at Veeam knows this. It is something we take seriously. Both Veeam and Cisco are brands that customers and partners can trust.

Developing the leading solution to allow our customers to trust their data is available all the time continues to be our goal.

Veeam Availability Solution on Cisco HyperFlex represents our two companies coming together to meet the demanding needs of you, our customers. We understand this and have worked to simplify the entire process. You can have confidence that we are as concerned with the Availability of your data just as much as you are.

Microsoft SharePoint is an invaluable tool used by organizations worldwide for data sharing and collaboration among teams. SharePoint provides businesses with a way to increase teamwork and productivity to streamline their processes and improve their business outcomes. There are several deployment options available for SharePoint, such as on-premises, online through Office 365 or a hybrid deployment. Each option has its own benefits, however, this blog post focuses on Veeam Explorer for SharePoint being used in an on premises deployment model of Microsoft SharePoint. If you’re using SharePoint online, Veeam Explorer is available to you as well through Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

An on-premises SharePoint farm could consist of multiple servers with each server needing to remain operating to meet your end user’s expectation. To meet a user’s demands, it’s important to have an Availability strategy in place. Veeam meets these expectations by giving you the technology to browse the database, restore individual items, and gain instant visibility while still being easy to use.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint

Veeam has developed many powerful built-in Explorers in its software, and Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint is no different. From the Veeam backup of your SharePoint server, you gain the ability to browse the content database, recover necessary items without having to fully restore, and start the virtual machine hosting the content database. Like the other Veeam Explorers, this tool is available with all editions of Veeam Backup & Replication, even the Free Edition!

When you perform a backup of your SharePoint Server, remember to enable Application Aware Image Processing. This technology creates a transactional-consistent backup to guarantee the proper recovery of your applications running on VMs. Once you successfully created the backup or replica of your SharePoint Server, you can start using the Explorer. There are a couple options available to you when using the Explorer, these include: browsing the SharePoint database, restoring individual SharePoint items and permissions, exporting items (sending as an email attachment or saving them to another location), and the ability to restore SharePoint sites.

Instant Visibility

Once you’re ready to perform a recovery, the application item restore wizard will auto-discover the SharePoint farms that were backed up and initiate the mount operation. During this operation, Veeam Backup & Replication retrieves information about SharePoint sites, the corresponding database server VMs, and restore points.

Figure 1: Veeam SharePoint Item restore wizard

When first initiating the restore, the wizard shows you the list of available sites included in the backup, allowing you to choose which site you want to explore to find the items you need. The Application Aware Image Processing technology is how Veeam Backup & Replication auto-discovers the information about your SharePoint Servers. It is important to remember to select this option when first performing the backup.

Figure 2: Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint

Within the Explorer itself is where you can view the content databases, sites, subsites, libraries and lists. Depending on what you select, you can browse and view its contents to find what is needed to restore. If your restoring a document, you can even open and preview the document to ensure it’s the correct item needed to recover. Available in all the editions of Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint delivers granular browsing and search capabilities to find any item or multiple items stored in any number of Microsoft SharePoint databases. To support this capability, the guest file system of the VM is mounted directly from the backup to a staging Microsoft SQL Server. By default, Veeam will use the SQL Server Express instance that was installed when you deployed Veeam Backup & Replication. One thing to note, the staging system must be compatible or the same version as the Microsoft SQL server that hosts the Microsoft SharePoint Content databases. If it is not, you will need to identify a staging SQL Server that is compatible to be able to use the Explorer. This is available within the Veeam Explorer options, under the SQL Server Settings tab. For detailed instructions on this functionality, please refer to the user guide.

With the amount of visibility Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint provides, you may want to be able to keep track of who is accessing the Explorer, what they are looking at, and why they are performing restores. For this, Veeam offers another layer of visibility, especially when it comes to restore operations. This visibility comes in the form of Veeam ONE, specifically the Restore Operators Report allowing you to safeguard your data with the ability to see who is accessing your data, where it is being restored to, and what items are being restored.

Veeam ONE Restore Operators Report

Veeam offers powerful, useful tools to ensure Availability for your business. Sometimes, we need to take an extra step to ensure we are still meeting the security requirements for the business as well. Veeam ONE’s Restore Operator’s Report gives you a detailed description of who is accessing your backup data and what restores they are performing or not performing. This allows you to gain an extra layer of visibility by being able to view all types of restore actions performed across the Veeam Backup Servers.

Figure 3. Restore Operators Activity Report

The above report shows who is accessing the backup data and what restores they are performing. This is an easy way to ensure that the correct people who have permission to be accessing certain data, are only accessing that data when and how they’re supposed to. The above image shows the different users performing restores and what type of restore it is, if its application, full VM, files, or even a restore from tape.

Figure 4. Restore Operators Report Continued

Going deeper into the report, you can see which VMs the users are accessing and what restores they are performing, or if they’re even performing a restore. This report is very useful to double check to ensure your users are only accessing what they should be accessing.

Conclusion

Microsoft SharePoint is a valuable tool used in organizations today to increase collaboration among teams to improve teamwork and organizational knowledge to be able to make better decisions. Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint allows you to keep your business’ most important applications available to meet your end users demands. An added benefit is this Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint is even included in Veeam Backup Free Edition — allowing you to start using this powerful technology today!

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Instant visibility & restore for Microsoft SharePoint, 5.0 out of 5 based on 3 ratings

Veeam, born early in the era of the cloud, has created a story of unprecedented success. The story tells of rapid growth, accelerating quarter after quarter, year after year, driven by innovation, product quality, and customer loyalty. 2017 was our best year yet, and this year we continue to grow with tremendous wind in our sails:

Total bookings growth increased throughout 2017, with double-digit growth in every quarter.

Recently, IDC released their market share numbers for 2017, and once again, Veeam leads the pack with more than 26% of overall growth in market share gain. IDC shows that in the last half of 2017 alone, the top three vendors combined lost36% market share while Veeam gained more than 26%. With this growth and success comes a sense of responsibility on our part to help customers see the future and prepare for the change and transformation that is coming.Company Momentum – Top 5 by Company Performance: 2017H2(Vendor Revenue, US Dollar, M)
The question I receive more than any other, is how is it possible for Veeam to continue to generate such growth and success? Especially when one considers we reside in an industry that has a large legacy vendor presence with established, mature products. The answer is multi-faceted, but focuses on three key ingredients:

Built for the Virtual World – Veeam was founded in 2006 to provide systems management solutions for virtualized infrastructures. Veeam quickly became synonymous with data Availability, emerging as the go-to provider for solutions supporting applications and data in cloud-spanning environments. Born in the era of the cloud and built in the era of the cloud.

Partner First Philosophy – In today’s world of rapidly evolving technologies, no company is able to go it alone. Success comes from building and participating in robust technology eco-systems. It is our primary focus to approach every challenge with partnerships, from working with thousands of channel partners, to building deep integration and collaboration with the largest technology vendors in our space.

It Just Works – Veeam has earned a reputation in every sector of the market, including SMB, commercial and enterprise, as a product that delivers on its promises. A product that can be trusted to maintain business continuity in the face of any challenge or disaster. That’s why when customers talk about the reliability of Veeam, they say, “It Just Works.”

Receiving third party validation from IDC helps us continue to tell our story. This isn’t just what we say, but what hundreds of thousands of our customers are saying around the world. In addition, our Net Promoter Score of 73, a number generated by asking companies if they would recommend a technology they have purchased, is 3.5x better than the industry average. When an IT manager chooses an Availability vendor to be there for backup and recovery, they aren’t just choosing a technology. They are betting the future of their company and their own career on that choice. We understand the importance of this decision and take pride in earning that trust. Legacy vendors are struggling to adapt and change in the new environment. Their solutions, built during an era of tape and disk, have failed to keep up with the new demands of data growth and data sprawl. Without the ability to adapt, their customers find themselves vulnerable and looking for a change. Our vision is to be the most trusted provider of Intelligent Data Management solutions, exceeding the expectations of a world that demands the Hyper-Availability of data. And our aim for the future is to expand on this vision to ultimately enable data to become self-managing. Veeam is in the perfect position to deliver on these promises of innovation and to radically improve how data is managed. Show more articles from this author

Makes disaster recovery, compliance, and continuity automatic

NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator helps you reduce the time, cost and effort of planning for and recovering from a disaster by automatically creating plans that meet compliance.

One of the most important components of Veeam Availability Orchestrator is the Failover Plan. The Failover Plan is an essential part of an organization’s disaster recovery plan. It contains the virtual machines to be protected, what steps to take during recovery, and other important information.

Now, we are going to take a look at the step-by-step process to creating your disaster recovery plan with Veeam Availability Orchestrator.

When you start the New Failover Plan Wizard, you will first be prompted to select a site. If you have multiple sites in your VAO environment, you would pick the production site of the application you are protecting.

Next, we want to give our Failover Plan a name. I like to use something that is clear and concise, such as the application name. You can also enter a description of your Failover Plan, as well as the contact information for the application you are protecting.

Next, we select the VM Group (or multiple VM Groups) containing the virtual machines of our application. As we mentioned in a previous post, VM Groups can be powered by VMware vSphere Tags. In this list, you can see the VMware vSphere Tags I have setup in my environment. In this case, I am going to select the applications with the HeliumRUN Windows Tag, since it has the virtual machines I am protecting with this Failover Plan.

Next are our VM Recovery Options. In this screen, we can decide how to handle a VM recovery failure in the unlikely event it happens. We can use VAO to run scheduled recovery tests on a regular basis, so this sort of failure would be a rare occurrence. We can also specify if we want to recover our VMs in a particular order, or at the same time, or finally how many VMs to recover simultaneously.

In the next screen, we are going to select the steps we are going to take for each VM during recovery. After we finish creating the Failover Plan, we will be able to add additional steps for individual VMs, including custom steps we upload to VAO. This is useful when we want to configure particular steps to verify the operation of an application such as Exchange, SharePoint, ISS, or SQL. For a complete list of Failover Plan steps included with VAO, be sure to take a look at the Veeam Availability Orchestrator official user guide here. Some steps, such as Verify SQL Database require credentials. If you select a step that requires credentials, you will be prompted to enter them for use.

One of the most important things to remember is that after we execute a disaster recovery plan, our disaster recovery site is now our production site. Because of this, it is very important that our applications receive the same level of protection they would on any other day. Luckily, Veeam Availability Orchestrator makes this easy by leveraging a pre-configured template job in Veeam Backup & Replication. At this screen, you can simply select the backup job you wish to use to protect your data at the disaster recovery site.

After ensuring your data is protected after your disaster recovery plan has executed, the next step is to configure Veeam Availability Orchestrator’s reporting capabilities. VAO has a completely customizable report template. These disaster recovery plan templates allow for the inclusion of all information needed during a disaster recovery plan execution, and can be scheduled to be sent to key stakeholders on a regular basis to ensure the environment is always ready for failover. For more about the reports included in VAO, be sure to check out this guide to VAO terminology.

By default, the Plan Definition Report and Readiness Check are scheduled to run daily, which is a great way to check the health of our disaster recovery plan. The Plan Definition Report includes all the information about the Failover Plan we just created, as well as a log of changes that have been made. The Readiness Check is a light-weight test that checks to ensure we are ready for a failover at a moment’s notice. If for some reason our Readiness Check has an error, we can then act to remediate it before a disaster strikes.

Finally, we are presented with a summary screen that shows us how our Failover Plan has been configured. Once we click Finish, we have completed setting up our Failover Plan.

If we want to make any changes to our Failover Plan, it’s as simple as right-clicking on our Failover Plan and selecting “Edit,” or highlighting our Failover Plan and clicking “Manage” and then “Edit” on the navigation bar. The edit state is where we can add specific steps to each virtual machine, or to the failover plan in general. For example, I have uploaded a script to be run in the event of a disaster to make some DNS changes for my environment DNS changes.

This screen can be used to add either Pre or Post failover steps, or steps to each VM individually. The steps can also be put into a particular order if desired. The best part of this functionally is the ability to create a custom flow of steps as needed for each VM. For example, I may want to use the included steps of Verify Web Server Port and Verify Web Site (IIS) for a web server in the Failover Plan, and different steps on the SQL server. All of these steps will then be captured in a Plan Definition Report the next time it is run.

Congratulations, you are now protecting your application with Veeam Availability Orchestrator! If you want to take a look at creating your own Failover Plan, you can download a 30-day FREE trial of Veeam Availability Orchestrator.

If you haven’t come across the term “LAPS” before, you might wonder what it is. The acronym stands for the “Local Administrator Password Solution.” The idea behind LAPS is that it allows for a piece of software to generate a password for the local administrator and then store that password in plain text in an Active Directory (AD) attribute.

Storing passwords in plain text may sound counter to all good security practices, but because LAPS using Active Directory permissions, those passwords can only be seen by users that have been given the rights to see them or those in a group with rights to see them.

The main use case here shows that you can freely give out the local admin password to someone who is travelling and might have problems logging in using cached account credentials. You can then have LAPS request a new password the next time they want to talk to an on-site AD over a VPN.

The tool is also useful for applications that have an auto login capability. The recently released Windows Admin Center is a great example of this:

To set up LAPS, there are a few things you will need to do to get it working properly.

Download the LAPS MSI file

Schema change

Install the LAPS Group Policy files

Assign permissions to groups

Install the LAPS DLL

Download LAPS

LAPS comes as an MSI file, which you’ll need to download and install onto a client machine, you can download it from Microsoft.

Schema change

LAPS needs to add two attributes to Active Directory, the administrator password and the expiration time. Changing the schema requires the LAPS PowerShell component to be installed. When done, launch PowerShell and run the commands:

Import-module AdmPwd.PS

Update-AdmPwdADSchema

You need to run these commands while logged in to the network as a schema admin.

Install the LAPS group policy files

The group policy needs to be installed onto your AD servers. The *.admx file goes into the “windowspolicydefintions” folder and the *.adml file goes into “windowspolicydefinitions[language]”

Once installed, you should see a LAPS section in GPMC under Computer configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> LAPS

The four options are as follows:

Password settings — This lets you set the complexity of the password and how often it is required to be changed.

Name of administrator account to manage — This is only required if you rename the administrator to something else. If you do not rename the local administrator, then leave it as “not configured.”

Do not allow password expiration time longer than required by policy — On some occasions (e.g. if the machine is remote), the device may not be on the network when the password expiration time is up. In those cases, LAPS will wait to change the password. If you set this to FALSE, then the password will be changed regardless of it can talk to AD or not.

Enable local password management — Turns on the group policy (GPO) and allows the computer to push the password into Active Directory.

The only option that needs to be altered from “not configured” is the “Enable local admin password management,” which enables the LAPS policy. Without this setting, you can deploy a LAPS GPO to a client machine and it will not work.

Assign permissions to groups

Now that the schema has been extended, the LAPS group policy needs to be configured and permissions need to be allocated. The way I do this is to setup an organizational until (OU), where computers will get the LAPS policy and a read-only group and a read/write group.

Because LAPS is a push process, (i.e. because the LAPS client on the computer is the one to set the password and push it to AD) the computer’s SELF object in AD needs to have permission to write to AD.

The PowerShell command to allow this to happen is:

Set-AdmPwdComputerSelfPermission -OrgUnit <name of the OU to delegate permissions>

To allow helpdesk admins to read LAPS set passwords, we need to allow a group to have that permission. I always setup a “LAPS Password Readers” group in AD, as it makes future administration easier. I do that with this line of PowerShell:

Set-AdmPwdReadPasswordPermission -OrgUnit <name of the OU to delegate permissions> -AllowedPrincipals <users or groups>

The last group I set up is a “LAPS Admins” group. This group can tell LAPS to reset a password the next time that computer connects to AD. This is also set by PowerShell and the command to set it is:

Set-AdmPwdResetPasswordPermission -OrgUnit <name of the OU to delegate permissions> -AllowedPrincipals <users or groups>

Once the necessary permissions have been set up, you can move computers into the LAPS enabled OU and install the LAPS DLL onto those machines.

LAPS DLL

Now that the OU and permissions have been set up, the admpwd.dll file needs to be installed onto all the machines in the OU that have the LAPS GPO assigned to it. There are two ways of doing this. First, you can simply select the admpwd dll extension from the LAPS MSI file.

Or, you can copy the DLL (admpwd.dll) to a location on the path, such as “%windir%system32”, and then issue a regsvr32.exe AdmPwd.dll command. This process can also be included into a GPO start-up script or a golden image for future deployments.

Now that the DLL has been installed on the client, a gpupdate /force should allow the locally installed DLL to do its job and push the password into AD for future retrieval.

Retrieving passwords is straight forward. If the user in question has at least the LAPS read permission, they can use the LAPS GUI to retrieve the password.

The LAPS GUI can be installed by running the setup process and ensuring that “Fat Client UI” is selected. Once installed, it can be run just by launching the “LAPS UI.” Once launched, just enter the name of the computer you want the local admin password for and, if the permissions are set up correctly, you will see the password displayed.

If you do not, check that that the GPO is being applied and that the permissions are set for the OU where the user account is configured.

Troubleshooting

Like anything, LAPS can cause a few quirks. The two most common quirks I see include when staff with permissions cannot view passwords and client machines do not update the password as required.

The first thing to check is that the admpwd.dll file is installed and registered. Then, check that the GPO is applying to the server that you’re trying to change the local admin password on with the command gpresult /r. I always like to give applications like LAPS their own GPO to make this sort of troubleshooting much easier.

Next, check that the GPO is actually turned on. One of the oddities of LAPS is that it is perfectly possible to set everything in the GPO and assign the GPO to an OU, but it will not do anything unless the “Enable Local password management” option is enabled.

If there are still problems, double check that the permissions that have been assigned. LAPS won’t error out, but the LAPS GUI will just show a blank for the password, which could mean that either the password has not been set or that the permissions have not been set correctly.

You can double check permissions using the extended attribute section of windows permissions. You can access this by launching Active Directory users and computers -> Browse to the computer object -> Properties -> Security -> Advanced

Double click on the security principal:

Scroll down and check that both Read ms-Mcs-AdmPwd and Write ms-Mcs-admpwd are ticked.

In summary, LAPS works very well and it is a great tool for deployment to servers, especially laptops and the like. It can be a little tricky to get working, but it is certainly worth the time investment.

Q3 ProPartner briefing

Did you miss our last quarterly partner briefing? Listen today to our most popular call, the ProPartner Briefing. Regardless of your knowledge and experience with Veeam®, we bring valuable content to all our partners.Hear from our executive leadership on recent product announcements, promotions and much more!https://youtu.be/39iX3QGOOdQ

Veeam, born early in the era of the cloud, has created a story of unprecedented success. The story tells of rapid growth, accelerating quarter after quarter, year after year, driven by innovation, product quality, and customer loyalty. 2017 was our best year yet, and this year we continue to grow with tremendous wind in our sails:

Total bookings growth increased throughout 2017, with double-digit growth in every quarter.

Recently, IDC released their market share numbers for 2017, and once again, Veeam leads the pack with more than 26% of overall growth in market share gain. IDC shows that in the last half of 2017 alone, the top three vendors combined lost 36% market share while Veeam gained more than 26%. With this growth and success comes a sense of responsibility on our part to help customers see the future and prepare for the change and transformation that is coming. Company Momentum – Top 5 by Company Performance: 2017H2(Vendor Revenue, US Dollar, M)The question I receive more than any other, is how is it possible for Veeam to continue to generate such growth and success? Especially when one considers we reside in an industry that has a large legacy vendor presence with established, mature products. The answer is multi-faceted, but focuses on three key ingredients:

Built for the Virtual World – Veeam was founded in 2006 to provide systems management solutions for virtualized infrastructures. Veeam quickly became synonymous with data Availability, emerging as the go-to provider for solutions supporting applications and data in cloud-spanning environments. Born in the era of the cloud and built in the era of the cloud.

Partner First Philosophy – In today’s world of rapidly evolving technologies, no company is able to go it alone. Success comes from building and participating in robust technology eco-systems. It is our primary focus to approach every challenge with partnerships, from working with thousands of channel partners, to building deep integration and collaboration with the largest technology vendors in our space.

It Just Works – Veeam has earned a reputation in every sector of the market, including SMB, commercial and enterprise, as a product that delivers on its promises. A product that can be trusted to maintain business continuity in the face of any challenge or disaster. That’s why when customers talk about the reliability of Veeam, they say, “It Just Works.”

Receiving third party validation from IDC helps us continue to tell our story. This isn’t just what we say, but what hundreds of thousands of our customers are saying around the world. In addition, our Net Promoter Score of 73, a number generated by asking companies if they would recommend a technology they have purchased, is 3.5x better than the industry average. When an IT manager chooses an Availability vendor to be there for backup and recovery, they aren’t just choosing a technology. They are betting the future of their company and their own career on that choice. We understand the importance of this decision and take pride in earning that trust. Legacy vendors are struggling to adapt and change in the new environment. Their solutions, built during an era of tape and disk, have failed to keep up with the new demands of data growth and data sprawl. Without the ability to adapt, their customers find themselves vulnerable and looking for a change. Our vision is to be the most trusted provider of Intelligent Data Management solutions, exceeding the expectations of a world that demands the Hyper-Availability of data. And our aim for the future is to expand on this vision to ultimately enable data to become self-managing. Veeam is in the perfect position to deliver on these promises of innovation and to radically improve how data is managed. Show more articles from this author

Makes disaster recovery, compliance, and continuity automatic

NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator helps you reduce the time, cost and effort of planning for and recovering from a disaster by automatically creating plans that meet compliance.

In June 2017 we announced that we would be working on support for the Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) and shortly after in October we were able to show an alpha build of the code and demo what functionality would be arriving. Today we are excited and pleased to announce that our Hyper-Availability story is generally available for the entire Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform, allowing us to protect all virtualized workloads – VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV – in an application consistent state.Support for Nutanix AHV comes with a new product –– Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV –– which includes many of the same easy-to-use features and functionality from Veeam Backup & Replication in a familiar portable backup file format. This also includes the ability to align your strategy with the 3-2-1 backup methodology through one of our many Veeam Cloud Service Providers (VCSP) partners, tape or backup copy to disk for offsite backups and long-term retention.

Overview

Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV will consist of three components:

Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 update 3a minimum

Veeam Backup Proxy Appliance for AHV

Veeam Backup repository (deduplication devices not supported in v1)

Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3a

The Veeam backup server is there to allow for authentication from the Veeam backup proxy appliance to give the ability to send backup files to the Veeam backup repository. The Veeam Backup Server also offers the ability for longer term retention to either tape, disk or Veeam Cloud Connect.

Veeam Backup Proxy Appliance for AHV

The proxy appliance will be deployed within the Nutanix Acropolis hyper-converged infrastructure cluster. Management of the appliance as well as the configuration, scheduling and execution of backups and full-VM restores will be handled by a new web UI, specifically designed to look and operate like Prism for familiarity, to Nutanix administrators and users.

Veeam Backup repository

The Veeam backup repository is a folder on a storage device that acts as a backup target that is managed by the Veeam backup server.

Features

Application consistency

The ability to take application consistent backups of your mission critical workloads is a must. This is achieved by requesting a Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) snapshot within the Nutanix AHV cluster. Nutanix guest tools (NGT) can then be used to trigger the preparation of the guest operating system for an online backup. For VMs where application consistency is required but NGT is not installed, Veeam recommends using the server edition of Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows or for Linux.

Changed Block Tracking

When Veeam Backup & Replication performs incremental backup, it needs to know what data blocks have changed since the previous job session. To get the list of changed data blocks, Veeam Backup & Replication uses the changed block tracking mechanism, or CBT. CBT Increases the speed and efficiency of incremental backups. The backup process will leverage the AHV CBT for full and incremental backups.

Protection domains

The ability to leverage Nutanix Protection Domains not only means the ability to keep a short-term amount of fast Recovery Point Objective (RPO) snapshots in place but it also means that this same Protection Domain which is a defined group of virtual machines can be leveraged to simplify backup management also.

Workflow

The backup proxy communicates with Nutanix AHV to trigger a virtual machine snapshot, retrieves virtual machine data block by block from datastores hosting virtual machines, compresses and deduplicates it and writes to the backup repository in Veeam’s proprietary format.

Recovery

Now let’s get to the interesting part, the backup is the insurance policy that none of us hope we ever have to use, the recovery though is where we could be saving jobs and lives.

Veeam Backup Proxy Appliance for AHV

Recovery options from the proxy appliance will be full-VM recovery to the original location, performed from within the web UI. The ability to restore individual virtual machine disks is also possible from the web UI.

Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3a

When it comes to the granular restore options, it is required to be in the Veeam backup server to perform these tasks. Granular restore options include:

I am super excited to see the technical innovation happening within Veeam, the elevation of the Hyper Converged market leader as a Veeam elite alliance partner and the addition of the third hypervisor within the Hyper-Availability Platform. I am now even more excited to see where this product goes in the future. I strongly encourage anyone that has AHV deployed or under evaluation to download the fully-functional FREE 30-day trial today.

Veeam Backup for Office 365 version 2 was released last week. In this blog post, and following the Sydney VeeamOn event where the following videos were presented, I’m pleased to share the demonstration with you all to help you quickly get started with a few basic topics.

Veeam and Huawei recently released new, integrated storage snapshot and orchestration capabilities for customers using Veeam and Huawei OceanStor storage. This new Veeam Plug-in is based on the Veeam Universal Storage API and allows Veeam solutions to deliver higher levels of backup and recovery efficiency when paired with the Huawei OceanStor storage infrastructure.The constant flow and management of data is taxing today’s organizations to their limit. Data has become hyper-critical to business, but IT organizations struggle to cope with their data’s hyper-growth and hyper-sprawl while protecting against data loss threats, ransomware, service outages and human error — all of which result in loss of business, productivity and reputation.To address these new business and technical requirements, Veeam partnered with Huawei and other leading storage providers to deliver integrated data protection and storage solutions. OceanStor customers can now leverage Veeam storage integration for VMware environments, bringing new levels of Intelligent Data Management to their data center for better RTPO (recovery time and point objectives).

Faster, efficient backup for Huawei OceanStor

Backup operations strain production storage environments, resulting in lower performance. New Veeam-Huawei integration brings agentless Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots capabilities to OceanStor storage, increasing Veeam backup speed by 2x, and up to 10x faster compared to competing backup solutions.Veeam’s usage of VMware Change Block Tracking while reading data from storage snapshots minimizes the performance impact on production VMs during backup. As a result, the VMware snapshot lifetime is lowered to minutes instead of hours — which is often the case when using VMware-based backups without storage snapshots.

During standard Veeam backup procedures, Veeam uses parallel disk backup to reduce the time window, but the VMware VM snapshot may be open for some time as would be expected. This leads to higher IO at the time of the VMware VM snapshot, and could cause a possible performance impact on the VM.The new integration allows Veeam to create Huawei snapshots in the background directly after the VM snapshot creation. The result is nearly instantaneous. In the example below, the VMware VM snapshot is open only until the storage snapshot was created, lowering the time required for the VMware snapshot to be open.

While certain variables can come into play and affect performance, this level of performance will not be uncommon for Huawei OceanStor customers using Veeam Availability storage snapshot integration.

Orchestrate your Huawei OceanStor storage snapshots

Veeam integration with OceanStor also includes orchestration capabilities that reduce backup management complexity and increase efficiency. The new Veeam Plug-in can orchestrate application-consistent storage snapshots without the need of any agent installed within the VMs.

In most IT organizations, backups are ideally scheduled during off hours, when they will not affect performance. However, the realities of today’s business demands on IT infrastructures make this approach obsolete. In today’s world, “off hours” don’t exist anymore. Constant use of available compute and infrastructure resources is key to better return on investment, so low usage windows are harder to find. More importantly, backups need to be taken more often to protect against data loss. Where one backup a night was acceptable in the past, the continuous creation of recovery points to meet higher recovery point objectives is now the common service level demand.Veeam snapshot orchestration helps you address this need with a mix of frequent crash-consistent and application-consistent snapshots.

Unlimited recovery options from storage snapshot

With Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots, you can use either Veeam orchestrated, or any other existing Huawei storage snapshot, to recover full VMs or single items from a snapshot, in many ways depending on what will be most efficient for the recovery situation.

Veeam integration brings new levels of flexibility for recovery with Huawei OceanStor storage. Full VM recovery is simple and quick, but more often than not, simple item recovery within a VM is the recovery use case.Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots gives IT teams recovery of individual items without requiring the normal time and resource consuming process of re-provisioning a VM. This item-level recovery is supported for Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Active Directory and SharePoint objects through a simple Windows Explorer-like interface. Veeam allows data, files, emails and more to be pulled from backups and into the production environment with a few clicks. Recovering Oracle databases out of a storage snapshot is also supported.

Automated DR/recovery verification and DataLabs

The new Veeam Plug-in for Huawei also brings automation to one of the biggest pain points and inconsistencies most organizations struggle to address in their backup and recovery operations. That is the fact that most IT backup administrators can never really be sure they can recover from the restore points in a disaster or when data is lost.

With Veeam and Huawei integration, Veeam On-Demand Sandbox for Storage Snapshots automates the process of creating a completely isolated copy of your production environment, verifies the viability from the snapshot, reports that status, and then deprovisions the environment. Veeam builds the DataLab from recent storage snapshots created by Huawei or any other third-party software and runs through a complete routine to verify VM boot, network connections, and application function. When finished, Veeam then reports the test results via email or through enhanced reporting found in Veeam Availability Suite.Creating what Veeam calls a DataLab, addresses two core needs in modern IT Infrastructures. First, it addresses the need for verified recoverability to meet regulatory and operational requirements, not to mention peace of mind for the IT team knowing they are prepared for disaster recovery when they are called.Second, DataLabs are extremely valuable to address the needs of your development teams, or any others that constantly require a dedicated lab environment with real-world data for the purpose of new solution development, upgrade and deployment testing, as well as risk assessment and mitigation planning.

Veeam and Huawei OceanStor are better together

Huawei is the latest storage provider to partner with Veeam for more efficient data management, more efficient backup, and faster recovery. Regardless of whether you want to speed up your Veeam backups or if you want to use storage snapshots next to real backups to lower your RTPO, with the newly released Veeam Storage Plug-in for Huawei OceanStor, you are on the right track and ready for the future.

This has been bothering me for a bit. When I do a test failover I see the error above. Here is a screenshot:This is an example out of my lab. I could start and stop the virtual lab in the VAO UI with no issues. I removed / uninstalled everything and tried again. Still had the same issue.The solution is a major surprise to me. Virtual Labs must be created where the replication consumed in the virtual lab is configured and started.In the example of the screenshot I started the replication to my DR site on vbr01.thewhites.ca. But yet, I created the virtual lab in the DR site.The answer to this all is that you need to start your replication in the DR site and of course that is where you should create your virtual labs that you use in VAO.Hope that this is clear but if not Google will hopefully deliver you to this article, and you can use the comments to learn more.Michael=== END ===